Replacing the irreplaceable turned out to be a surprisingly smooth process for Manchester United, who looked 25 miles west to find David Moyes at Everton. There was no carousel of names, no fortnight of uncertainty and no superficial box office lunge for a celebrity coach.

Beneath the placid surface, Moyes will not have been the only name mentioned inside Old Trafford. But when the moment came United opted for continuity. They ignored the absence of major trophies on the Everton manager’s CV and backed him to carry on the work of Sir Alex Ferguson, who shaped the whole club in his image.

Like Ferguson, Moyes is a straight-shooter who is unafraid to deliver hard truths to players. He is also a steady builder and a natural coach. His appointment confirmed that United trust their own values and structure.

The big European powers would not hesitate to hire a coach with Moyes’s background. The idea that only a manager hired from the 10-man elite of European super coaches could take over from Ferguson was blown away.

For the wider English game, the decision brought powerful encouragement for young coaches at all levels. Five years ago people grumbled that there was a glass ceiling for British coaches. They could never break into the top four Premier League clubs. Nor were they in demand from clubs abroad. They were pariahs in their own land.

Now, Manchester United managed are by a young Glaswegian who learned his trade at Preston North End before spending 11 years at Everton. Ferguson abhors the fast-tracking of famous players. Moyes served an apprenticeship. He will not work on a two-year cycle. Coaching in this country has been given the boost it craved.

Now it should repay the gesture by raising standards to those of Germany and Spain.

It was far from a vintage season at Arsenal and, unusually, it was defensive grit rather than flowing football that got them over the line in the race for a top-four finish.

Yet to underline their Jekyll and Hyde campaign, they still produced what was surely the season’s most spectacular 10-minute burst of football, in scoring four times during their eventual 5-1 win over West Ham United in January. To repeat a favourite instruction of Arsène Wenger, they played “with the handbrake off” and it was a truly magnificent sight.

Reminiscent even of the ‘Invincibles’ of Henry, Bergkamp and Pirès, Arsenal ripped West Ham apart with a passage of football that was so slick, incisive and clinical, it was almost a blur.

They did not reach those heights again but, even so, it was a performance that ultimately provided a springboard for an outstanding run of form throughout 2013.

After that match, they went on a run of 11 wins, one defeat and three draws to have the best record of any Premier League club in the final section of the season.

No one encapsulated Arsenal’s inconsistency quite like Lukas Podolski. Anonymous during large periods of the season, he was at his absolute peak that night in January against West Ham.

Having scored with one 25-yard shot of shuddering power, Podolski also demonstrated his vision and creativity in providing three assists in as many minutes. Olivier Giroud and Santi Cazorla (above), Wenger’s other two summer signings, also shone, while Jack Wilshere and Theo Walcott were hugely influential.

Every goal, including Jack Collison’s strike for West Ham, was of considerable quality, but Cazorla’s exquisite back-heel probably just shaded Podolski’s piledriver as the highlight of an evening that provided quite spectacular entertainment. Unless, of course, your name was Sam Allardyce.

April 29 was the night when Paul Lambert’s unwavering commitment to his emerging Aston Villa squad was emphatically rewarded.

After months and months of humiliating experiences, with his judgement and faith in young players under such scrutiny, a 6-1 win over Sunderland saw Lambert take a massive stride towards survival and create a tidal wave of optimism for the future.

Villa were still down among the dead men at this point, with the hands of relegation clawing away at the throats of his players but what followed was manna from heaven for the fans who had rigidly stuck by their manager all season.

Christian Benteke (above, left) marked his stunning breakthrough season in English football with a hat-trick as Paolo Di Canio stood on the touchline in the rain, watching his Sunderland team get ripped apart again and again. It was not just the Benteke show, either, as Andreas Weimann, Matthew Lowton and Fabian Delph underlined their vast improvement under Lambert in a rampant performance that continued their scramble to safety.

Ron Vlaar’s first goal for the club, a breathtaking drive from almost 35 yards, set the tone, before Danny Rose ruined any hopes Lambert may have had of a rare clean sheet with a well-taken equaliser. But then Villa simply took over. Weimann gave Villa the lead again before Benteke stampeded his way to a 17-minute treble. Gabriel Agbonlahor, who had fallen off the radar after struggling with the tactics of Lambert’s two predecessors, added the seventh to complete a stirring night.

A dour 1-1 draw between Norwich and Tottenham on a chilly January night in Norfolk would not normally make it into a showreel for highlights of the 2012-13 Premier League season. But then there is Gareth Bale (below).

For 80 minutes Spurs had huffed and puffed in tricky conditions against fully committed opponents, and appeared to be sliding towards defeat.

Then a first-time pass from substitute Lewis Holtby, another from Jermain Defoe and Bale collected possession in the centre-circle still inside his own half. Midfielder Alex Tettey tried to trip him, but he rode that crude challenge, and as Javier Garrido back-pedalled furiously the defender did not know which way to turn. Bale was in full flight, the other defenders were in his wake, two lunging at him as he shaped to shoot. But the ball was ferried to his left foot and it flashed past goalkeeper Mark Bunn.

From taking the ball in his stride in his own half to scoring, less than eight seconds had elapsed before Bale scored.

Only Cristiano Ronaldo has scored goals with the same kind of power and pace and edge-of-the-seat style in the Premier League in recent years. Bale was like a force of nature and he salvaged a point for his team.

Such a sight became the signature of this campaign – nine times he scored a winning goal. Bale probably scored better goals, but in the context of a difficult evening for his team his intervention was exhilarating. It also made the 350-mile round trip on a midweek night worthwhile for this reporter.

In 2012 the telling blow was struck in the final seconds of the season; this year it came long before the end.

There were still a dozen points to play for in the title race when Manchester United’s Wayne Rooney picked the ball up in his own half and launched a perfectly judged pass forward to the fringes of the Aston Villa area. Racing on to his team-mate’s prompt, Robin van Persie (below), his eyes wide in greedy anticipation, watched the ball arrive over his shoulder and on to his left foot.

Then, in a single ruthless movement, he dispatched it on the volley, swerving and spinning past Brad Guzan. “It was too beautiful a pass to take another touch,” he said afterwards. And he was right. Though only the most sublime technique could treat such a wonderful pass with such respect.

Van Persie’s was the goal that finally secured the title, the goal that for United fans announced that normal service had been resumed in the Premier League. It was a moment that encapsulated the whole season, that summed up the Dutchman’s move to Old Trafford: here was the man who made a difference, visibly making a difference. Here was the player whose goals had seized the advantage back from Manchester City scoring a pivotal goal. And in recording a hat-trick against Villa he was demonstrating that, after faltering the previous year, United had regained their title-accruing habit of gaining maximum points against the division’s struggling teams.

For Arsenal fans, too, the goal was richly symbolic. It was a horrible reminder of what they had lost. Van Persie had scored with an almost identical strike the previous season against Everton, when he had hammered home Alex Song’s chip. But that had turned out to be a pretty meaningless encounter. Now he was doing it for someone else in a championship-sealing performance: how that must have hurt.

My memory of the season would have to be Frank Lampard (below), a player I know so well from my time working at Chelsea, becoming the club’s all-time record scorer with his two goals at Aston Villa in April.

For Frank to clock up 203 goals and, in doing so, beat a record previously held for many years by Bobby Tambling, who is rightly remembered as a legend by supporters at the club, is a simply outstanding achievement.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with Frank, and you will struggle to find a more dedicated professional-footballer playing in the English game today. That record is something people will look back on in years to come and realise how much of an achievement it was: there is simply nobody else quite like him in the game.

It is all the more impressive given we are talking about a player who is not a striker and whose goals have come from the centre of midfield.

To continue that same level of performance and score that amount of goals is going to be very hard for anyone to beat.

Frank’s achievement this season has obviously helped him secure a new one-year contract at Stamford Bridge, and there is no doubt in my mind that was the right thing to do from the club’s point of view.

It will have to be getting into the car after Wigan had lost at home to Swansea and hearing the news that Sir Alex Ferguson was to retire.

The shock of that will stay with me forever and it is arguably not just the moment of this season but of the Premier League since it began.

For somebody of my age that is the moment I will always remember, having covered so many great matches and great goals as a commentator.

It has been incredible watching him build and rebuild teams for such a long time. It was like the sun rising in the morning: you just expected him to be there. To find out that would no longer be the case was a genuine shock and I struggled to deal with the enormity of it for the 3½-hour drive home.

The next day the announcement came and my phone never stopped ringing. There were obviously desperate attempts to reach anybody who had ever shaken his hand!

He managed so many amazing things at Manchester United and, while there were obviously limitations to the way you went about your business while he was there, he was essentially a good man. He had a never-failing sense of duty and must have attended more funerals in the last 10 years than anybody else in football.

I was at the funeral of a journalist this year and he came and made a perfectly judged speech and was still there when I left. I said to him that what he had done meant a huge amount and how good it was of him to come, and he simply replied: “What’s half a day out of my time?”

It is going to take some getting used to, not seeing him next season, that is for sure.

It seemed a rhetorical question from a colleague in the press box. “He didn’t just bite Ivanovic did he?”

Startled looks appear on everyone with a laptop. “No. Bite? No. He didn’t … did he?”

As Liverpool and Chelsea continue to play, we are now staring at what pass for TV monitors in the media area to establish if Luis Suárez (below, right) did, indeed, mistake Branislav Ivanovic’s arm for a baguette.

It seems inconclusive at first, but we do not have access to the full gamut of Sky TV angles. The text messages begin to flow so regularly it is as if sirens are going off at Anfield, both neutral and biased viewers watching at home confirming to everyone inside the stadium there is no mistaking what Suárez did. At this point, the professional reaction ought to be to relish such a story emerging from a fixture that rarely fails to prick the national consciousness.

Instead there is a feeling of despair as, yet again, Suárez has undermined his on-field brilliance with crass behaviour. The Uruguayan seems to be on a mission to be the central character of that much-anticipated book FA Disciplinary Committees: A History.

When Suárez heads an equaliser in the final minute of injury time, he and his team-mates celebrate presuming he has just claimed his place on every back page. He seems oblivious to the fact he is already destined to be on the front.

Nobody at Anfield has ever seen anything like this before. Well, apart from those who witnessed Jermain Defoe do something similar to Javier Mascherano, or watched that infamous YouTube clip of Suárez earning the nickname 'The Cannibal of Ajax’ at his former club.

The Liverpool manager walks into a press conference where any hope the first question would be “What about that for a game, Brendan?” has long since passed.

The Merseyside club immediately condemn their striker but shift into defensive mode as the opportunists and preachers mobilise, with none other than the Prime Minister David Cameron leading the attack.

It is made clear his chances of winning either of the Player of the Year awards have gone and he must seek psychiatric help.

Some call for deportation. Their desire for Suárez to never be seen playing for the Merseyside club again may yet be granted, if he chooses to leave this summer. We are still dealing with the repercussions of this one.

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Incredible BaleDwight Yorke

Gareth Bale has been responsible for so many magical moments this season and it is really difficult to simply pick one out.

But whenever I think of Bale this season, I can still picture that incredible last-minute winner he scored at West Ham.

It was a game threatening to slip away from Spurs but, as has happened so many times before this season, he pulled it out the bag and made sure one point became three points for his team.

The goal just summed him up – he got knocked down but still got back up and then struck an absolutely wonderful shot into the top corner. There have been a few crackers from Bale, including the one on the final day against Sunderland, but the West Ham winner is my top memory.

He has got that tag now where he is seen as a one-man team. There cannot be any bigger accolade than that, though his team-mates would probably not agree.

But if his team are not playing well he is the one that causes so much excitement and grabs games by the scruff of the neck.

Bale is the man now and, of course, you have to wonder if Spurs can keep hold of him after finishing outside the top four. He is the player everybody wants.

How can he have won so many awards this season and ended up with nothing?

Paolo Di Canio’s (below) appointment as Sunderland manager was one of the most divisive in the club’s history thanks to his dubious political past, but all that changed with victory over Newcastle United in English football’s most volatile derby.

Di Canio’s first week in the job was soured by the controversy over his political beliefs and a poor public relations response by the club, which said it was “insulting” to claim a man who has appeared in pictures performing fascist salutes and has a tattoo of the former Italian dictator Benito Mussolini on his back had any fascist leanings.

David Miliband, the local Labour MP and former Foreign Secretary, resigned as the club’s vice-chairman in protest, while the Durham Miners Association demanded its banner back in disgust at the appointment of a manager who appears to have idolised Mussolini. Fans bickered among themselves, split between supporting their team and rejecting the manager’s right-wing politics.

Di Canio, did not just ensure peace broke out with that magnificently unexpected 3-0 win at the home of the club’s bitter rivals, he instantly assured himself cult-hero status. Football and politics do not mix and the victory over Newcastle proved once more that fans will forgive almost anything if results are good on the pitch.

It was Sunderland’s first win at St James’ Park in 13 years, a miserable run that Newcastle fans were never shy in reminding them about. But this was not just a defeat, this was a humiliation for the Magpies, as the visitors secured their biggest derby win since 1979, a defeat which prompted a small riot in Newcastle city centre after the game.

Di Canio was undoubtedly the inspiration and architect. A team that had laboured and looked shorn of confidence under Martin O’Neill, were buoyant and brave and fully deserved their win.

Their Italian manager ran up the touchline to celebrate Stephane Sessègnon’s first goal, but it was the slide on his knees after Adam Johnson’s second that sticks in the memory. His expensive suit may have been ruined, but the sight of Di Canio on his knees, his mouth wide open as he roared his delight with his backroom staff celebrating wildly behind him, will go down in Tyne-Wear derby folklore.

He described it at the time as his greatest moment in football, but it was the momentum that it brought that ensured Di Canio was able to achieve what he had been hired to do: save Sunderland from relegation.

Dimitar Berbatov (below) deserves so much better than Fulham. No disrespect intended to a lovely club, but in a just world, Berbatov would be winning Champions League finals, deciding title races, starring in Nike adverts with Roger Federer, getting cocktails named after him. Keeping a small, mid-table team gingerly afloat? Not so much.

For while Berbatov is one of most naturally-gifted footballers English football has ever seen, he is also one of its most underrated delights: undervalued by Sir Alex Ferguson, unfairly caricatured as lazy by many fans and commentators. “When I play, I enjoy myself,” he said earlier in the season. “When I enjoy myself, things happen.” And at Craven Cottage on a chilly Monday night in April, things certainly happened.

Berbatov did some marvellous things that night. He won and converted a penalty, and scored a second as 10-man Fulham won 3-2. But it was not his goals that quickened the pulse so much as what he did in between — teasing, toying, taunting the QPR defence, his aim not merely triumph but humiliation. One piece of skill in particular stood out.

Berbatov is near the right byline when a high, diagonal ball comes floating over. His first task is to chase the ball down, keep his eye on it, keep it in play and bring it under control. The angle is too tight, Armand Traoré in too close attendance, for him to shoot on the volley. Instead, as the ball drops over his left shoulder, he sticks out a toe – a toe! – and taps it back up in the air. Traoré is helpless to arrest his momentum as the ball arcs delicately over his head.

Meanwhile, Berbatov has sidestepped Traoré, who is fast disappearing out of play, and recovered his balance just in time to bring the falling ball under control at his feet. Pure sorcery. Athleticism, audacity, deftness, agility and grace, all in the space of about a second. His cutback hits Jose Bosingwa and lands in the arms of Julio Cesar. This seems somehow perfect.

In the days before YouTube, before every single goal and flick and nutmeg and tackle was played and replayed to tedium, the only way of sharing this piece of sublime brilliance would be by describing it in words. And let’s be honest, you’d struggle as much as I just have.